Authentic Leadership: LTG Charles D. Luckey

Ken Harbaugh:

I’m Ken Harbaugh, host of Warriors In Their Own Words. In partnership with the Honor Project, we’ve brought this podcast back at a time when our nation needs these stories more than ever.

Warriors in Their Own Words is our attempt to present an unvarnished, unsanitized truth of what we have asked of those who defend this nation. Thank you for listening, and by doing so, honoring those who have served.

Today, we’ll hear from Lieutenant General Charles D. Luckey. Luckey served in the Army as an infantry officer, special forces officer (Green Beret), and a JAG officer. He retired as the oldest Green Beret in uniform.

In this interview, Luckey tells stories from his service, and what he learned about leadership during his career.

Lt. Gen Charles D. Luckey:
So, my name is Charles D. Luckey, retired from the United States Army as a Lieutenant General, that's an O-9. And spent most of my careers, actually a balance between the Army Reserve and the active component of the United States Army. I was infantry officer, special forces officer, and a JAG officer, and finished out my career as the Commanding General of the United States Army Reserve.

My grandfather was a — man in the First World War, volunteered 17 … your classic sort of quasi apocryphal story. He lied about his age, whatever, got into the army, served in the First World War, volunteered and actually was very aggressive about making sure that he got into the thick of things.Ended up unbeknownst to him at the time being awarded the Silver Star when he left the service, he made Corporal twice and lost it twice. He left the Army as a PFC because he kept getting into fights, believe it or not. I don't know what happened to that DNA, but clearly, I didn't get any of that.

So, he was sort of my model for what citizen/soldierly looks like as far as volunteering, performing, and then coming back and returning to civilian life. And he spent three years in the army, came back, went to college, and was a banker in New York City.

My dad, his son, served in the Second World War. And like every other kid who graduated from high school in 1942/43 literally had about a 10-day break from the time he graduated from the Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut, to being inducted and going to what was, I think then Camp Dix for sort of basic training. And served in China, in that theater, the CBI theater in the Second World War. So, I had experience as the son and the grandson of soldiers who had served for brief periods of time, absolutely loved the United States Army and had returned to civilian life. And so, I was the first officer in the history of the Luckey family. And my dad was, I think, proud that I was on the path to become an officer, but he never really had much time for lieutenants or captains, much less generals. So, here we are. Who knows?

A buddy of mine who was on my hall, my first year at the University of Virginia, a guy named Carl Sharp, who's no longer with us. Who had hair down to his shoulders, as did I, this is the fall of 1973. On a Thursday morning, I've probably been at UVA for three weeks. I'm walking back into my dorm, I'm at dorm at UVA and I see this kid coming out in a uniform with a short haircut. And it looked like somebody I was supposed to know, but I couldn't figure it out. And I realized it's Sharp. I'm like, “Sharp, what are you doing?” And he said, “I'm going to drill.” And I'm like, “What?” And he was in a uniform. “And what happened to your hair?” He said, “Well, I wear a wig.” And back then you were allowed to wear a wig and to be an ROTC, because if you could fog a mirror, they wanted you to join, because ROTC Programs have been crushed when the draft, or at least the lottery was terminated for Vietnam. And so, he slowly and actually dragged me into the ROTC Program at the University of Virginia, which is where I was commissioned.

I was recruited into the Marine Air program, and, but right after Vietnam, which is when I joined the U.S. military, they were so hurting for folks that they were willing to let people who didn't have perfect vision fly F-4s. And so, I thought that's what I wanted to do. And once I got to Quantico for the Platoon Leader course for training they rapidly decided, no, my eyes weren't good enough, and they wanted me to become an infantry officer in the Marine Corps. And I said, “Well, if I'm going to be an infantry officer, I'll do it in the Army, and I'll become a paratrooper instead.” So, that's what I did. So, I had a very short career as a young Marine when I was in my second year at the University of Virginia.

I joined the Army at a time when the Army was going through a massive period of transition, pivoting from Vietnam. Our doctrine to fight a major existential war in Europe was just developing. It had been informed and was being informed by leaders who had gone and served with and learn from the Israelis based on things that happened in the conflict there with the Egyptians and others. And so, it was really a formative period for the Army in terms of not just reinventing itself in terms of its manpower, because all of a sudden there was no draft, but also reinventing itself in terms of what became Airland doctrine, which was a fundamental paradigm shift in terms of the way the army thought about integrating combat operations at scale against an adversary below the nuclear threshold. But at the same time, being able to go across the nuclear threshold that's required.

So, my early experience as a soldier was very much about trying to lead an army that frankly at my level, at the platoon and company level, probably less than half of my platoon at that point had graduated from high school. There were very few non-commissioned officers. It was a fairly austere leadership paradigm at the company level, just because of the paucity of non-commissioned officers. So, many folks had left the force after Vietnam.

But Ken, I got to tell you, it was also, from a developmental perspective, probably a really foundational experience for me as a young officer. And I've thought about this a lot over the years. What it did was it really forced me to understand my force, my unit, my troops, communicate with them, motivate them, and understand that 80% of leadership, particularly in an austere environment is persuasion. More often by setting the example and not asking your troops to do anything you wouldn't do yourself, sort of thing. So I won't say the defeat, although strategically, obviously or at least operationally it was. It wasn't so much the loss in Vietnam so much as it was I think the army had me to really pivot and transition itself from being mired in that environment for years, and then coming out of it with an all-volunteer force, relatively outdated equipment, relatively outdated doctrine, and then transitioning to something that I think I would argue culminated with Desert Storm. And I think I was privileged to be able to live through the Army for all those years and see that transition.

When I was a lieutenant and a platoon leader, and particularly a company executive officer, I got very frustrated to the fact that, we would do health and welfare inspections in the barracks. Every service probably did the same thing. And we would routinely find narcotics or drug paraphernalia, whatever, in ceiling tiles and stuff like that. And the guys would purchase clean urine. So, if there's urinalysis, they could take a bag and put it in their uniform or whatever and use somebody else's urine to try to pass a drug test, that sort of thing. And we would invariably find this evidence of crime in ceiling tiles or in other sort of common areas. And the lawyers would say, “We can't pin it on anybody because we don't really know whose it is.” And, and I'm thinking, “That's kind of counterintuitive. You've got three guys in a room, and there's got to be a way.”

Anyway, it was probably naivete on my part, but I decided the best way to kill a lawyer is to be a lawyer because it takes a lawyer to do that. And so, I decided maybe the right thing for me to do is to go to law school. And I really had never intended to stay in the army for more than my initial three-year tour. I was commissioned as a regular army officer, so I had a three-year obligation.

But I would say my frustration with what I thought was sort of inappropriate use of the law to defend what I regarded at the time is, I'll just say less than ideal behavior on part of our soldiers, was what sort of motivated me to better understand the law, the limitations, the rules of evidence, the burdens of proof, all that stuff. And so, that's really what motivated me to go to law school.

Yeah. So, I'd gone from army infantry to special forces. So, when I left the army, the active component, I was in command of operational detachment outfit, SFA team 216, our focus was on Northern Europe. Our mission if we had to execute it was essentially infiltrate behind what would then been Soviet lines into Northern Norway and conduct operations in support of the Norwegian resistance against the Soviets.

So, I transitioned from that operational paradigm to law school, went to University of Connecticut. And if I had gone to law school straight out of college, I don't think I would've done particularly well. I think for me, the experience of having been an infantry officer, special forces officer, and it always having sort of, I would say, an inquisitive mind about how things work and how you can optimize things that motivated me to law school.

I was actually very comfortable in that environment. I found myself not struggling nearly as much as many of my classmates who had gone straight from college to law school. Saw law school as an extension of their collegiate experience because they hadn't really thought about what else they wanted to do. For me, it was a decision that I made to leave the active component of the army, go to law school. And I treated it like a job. And I did PT every morning. I would read all the cases I was supposed to read at night, I'd outline them and hit the class at eight o'clock in the morning. And some mornings, I think I was the only person awake. So, I actually ended up having a competitive advantage because I was actually paying attention to doing the work.

And it opened up a whole world for me because I was meeting people that had come from places that were not the military, but I felt comfortable with them. I mean, these are all kids. This is a New England law school, and I was raised in New England. So, it was a very uplifting and an exciting environment for me because I'll never forget the first day of law school, Tom Meskill, who had been a justice on the Second Circuit for Court of Appeals. And he'd been the governor of Connecticut, came and talked at the opening day ceremonies, whatever, for the University of Connecticut Law School, which is in Hartford. And Governor Meskill said, “One of the great things about being a lawyer is, unlike a lot of professions, you can do this for a long, long time. Because technology matters, but what really matters is experience and judicial temperament and a sense for jurisprudence in the ability to know when to talk and when to listen, and how to take problems and break them down into component parts and figure out ways to get to a solution that's helpful for everybody sort of thing.” And I never forgot that. And when Governor Meskill said that, you know what? I'm in the right place. And I never looked back. I never spent one minute in law school thinking, “Man, why did I sign up for this?” I did get active in the Army Reserve at that time. I was in a civil affairs company in West Hartford, Connecticut. So, I maintained a connection with the army and which actually I found to be very helpful as I transitioned through law school. But it was a very uplifting place to be at that point in my life and in my career.

So, we did a night infiltration at the northern Norway. This is probably in March of, I guess it was 82. And anyway, so we do this night infiltration door opens and if you've ever seen the movie, Where Eagles Dare, it was like the opening scene of Where Eagles dare, where it's just, the moon's out, everything is white, there's mountains as far as you can see, and we're flying all by ourselves in an MC-130 low level for a nighttime infiltration into Norway. And I'd never been to Norway before and didn't have a passport.

Anyway, so we jump in, my team sergeant, who was a master sergeant, didn't make it out the door because the red light came on before everybody could get out of the airplane because it was a really short in terms of time.

So, we jump, and I look below, and I see this absolutely gorgeous, pristine white field, which is the drop zone. And I'm assuming this is going to be the neatest softest landing of my entire life. And of course, we're all jumping with all kinds of equipment because we spent three weeks in the boonies in northern Norway and that kind of thing.

Anyway, long story short hit the ground and it was just sheet ice. And it was like the hardest thing I've ever landed on. And I've got over 80 jumps, and this is the hardest landing I ever had. We were jumping with weapons exposed, the ice went up in the barrel of my M16 and everything else. But it was quite a welcome to Norway. And the guys who were playing the role of the resistance fighters, were sort of in the wood line laughing at these Americans as they all got smoked on this sheet of ice, but nobody got injured, and we continued the mission.

There's one story I want to share about that entire three weeks. Three days into the operation, we were sitting on the side of a mountain or a hill in northern Norway and my team; camo guy, and the medic came to me and they said, “Hey boss, we got a problem.” And they didn't normally call me boss or sir, it was the special forces, is kind of an interesting environment. But anyway, they were clearly looking at me now as the person who could do something. So, all of a sudden, I was the boss, and, “Sir, we have a problem.” “What's the problem?” “Problem is, we can't make comms.”

Okay, well that's a huge problem because if you're operating a special forces team and you're literally 1500 miles away from your next higher headquarters, which at that time was in a place in England and you're sending back by morse code, single band transmissions encrypted back to your higher headquarters and you haven't made contact, you're essentially of no value to anybody because nobody can contact you and you can't contact anybody. So, that would be a zero on a score of one to a hundred as far as the effectiveness of operation, the SF-ODA 216.

So, these guys knew that, and what they said was, “We got a problem, but we think we got to fix.” “What's the problem?” “Well, the problem is we left the coax, be a coaxial cable back in the team house at Fort Devens, Massachusetts.” Okay, so that's a problem. So, of course I'm doing what any officer would do. I'm thinking through, okay, let's think about all of the things that should have happened that didn't happen for us to get all the way here after … we'd been gone from Fort Devens for 10 days at that point training up and going into isolation, a bunch of other stuff in Denmark. So, how many people didn't do their job for us to get to here where we don't have a coaxial cable? Anyway, we didn't have a coax.

So, then they did the smart thing, which was immediately came to me with a solution. The solution was we need to be able to cut the antenna to make a coax. Now, cutting the antenna meant taking a super dioxide antenna, which back then, this was before tax at radios, and GPS, and satellite radio and all other jazz. Hang this threaded wire into trees at the right wavelength so they could propagate the right signal at the right frequency to send messages back to England. And the problem for them was the antenna cost a lot of money. It was probably 2000 bucks then, that probably means it was a $25,000 antenna today. And they needed to be able to cut it because it was the only thing that could move the current from the radio to the antenna already sort of thing. And they'd figured out a way to use, I mean literally duct tape or band aids and petroleum jelly and all other jazz to make this cable, but they needed my permission to destroy a portion of the antenna. And I said, “Cut the antenna.” And so, they did. And 15 minutes later we were comms up.

So, they spent a couple days trying to figure out, and here's the teaching point. They spent a couple days trying to figure out how to fix a problem that they didn't want to tell me about yet because they wanted to come to me with a solution. And they were smart enough to A, figure out how to build the antenna, but B also smart enough to know that the best way to handle Luckey is to go to them with a problem, but also a solution that is missing one ingredient.

And here's the teaching point. The ingredient was my authority, which they didn't have, to authorize them to knowingly and willfully damage or destroy government property, because they didn't have that authority. And I've told soldiers for so many years, here's what I learned that day. You could put me with a book in every tool that was in that first aid kit and then single men's kit with a book and leave me on the side of that mountain and come back a year later, I still would not have been able to build that coax. These two kids knew what they were doing. They had to work together and collaborate across two different paradigms. One's communications or architecture and the other is medicine and how stuff interacts. So, whatever in terms of different components in the kit. But they figured it out and then they came to me to give them the authority to do what they needed to do.

So that in my mind, is the responsibility of leadership, especially at scale, to be able to empower other people to do things that they can do a hell of a lot better than you can, but they need you as a leader to give them the authority, the permission to be the best that they can be. And that's what happened.

And I've never forgotten that. And I've told people over and over, all across my career, over 40 years in the army, you got to learn how to make sure you know when it's your responsibility to tell somebody cut the antenna.

One of the places where I felt that sense of, I guess grace is a good way to put it. When I was a judge advocate, I was a prosecutor in the second airborne division at Fort Bragg for years. And during operation, Just Cause, there is an incident at a place called the Madden Dam Complex. Long story short, I'm trying to interview some witnesses and I'm flying in a helicopter to go up to this one point to talk to this one lieutenant who was supposedly, and it turned out he was an eyewitness to what had happened. And I'm in this helicopter and I'm flying over Lake Katonah, and I think it's the only time in history that the Panama Canal had been closed. And so, sort of flying south, I'm able to look out over the Pacific and as far as I can see, there are lights and it's evening, it's dusk, and there are lights, and there's all this shipping that's waiting to come through the canal. And the canal's been shut. And beneath me are all these people coming out of their homes, because they hear this army helicopter flying, it was an old UH1 flying up this valley, and they're waving these white flags, which were the flags of the folks that were resisting Noriega. And they were so happy and so grateful that the United States had come to relieve them of the suppressor.

And it was a sense of responsibility, but also, I was like thinking, “Man, this is actually a good thing we're doing. This is cool. I mean, these people love us, and they need us, and we're freeing the oppressed.” Which is sort of the SF motto.

So, it was one of those moments where I thought, this is so cool. I mean, how many judge advocates get to be in a helicopter with a rucksack in a mission to go interview a witness in the jungle, sort of all by themselves.

At this point, I'd left special forces and graduated from law school. And it was just one of those moments of sort of personal fulfillment that this is about as cool as it's going to get when it comes to being a judge advocate at least at the tactical level. And that was a special thing because there was a sense of gratitude.

And yeah, I mean, gratitude for being able to be sort of in the right place at the right time and just feeling like there's no place else anywhere that I should be than where I am right now.

When I was a one star, I was responsible for a team. Again, another team of just incredibly wonderful professionals, both military and civilian, joint team in what was the security cooperation office in Baghdad. This is in 2008. And I was literally talking to a Navy vice admiral at the time back in DC on the phone. And Admiral Wieringa was at that point heading up the organization called DSCA. And they were essentially the organization back in the states that was helping supply different capabilities as requested by my office and paid for by the Iraqis to the Iraqi forces, whether security forces or military forces. And I don't think Admiral Wieringa will mind me sharing this story, but we're on the phone and he's also by the way, the guy who's responsible for making sure that certain pieces of American equipment to include my up armored Chevy Tahoe or whatever it was were supplied to my office.

We're on the phone and we got blown up, we got hit in a rocket attack and the building took a bunch of shrapnel and stuff like that. And everybody's on the floor. And then I told Admiral Wieringa I got to go; I'll call you back. And so, a couple of people got hurt and there was sort of … as you can imagine there was about a half hour there where everybody's adrenaline's pumping and folks had to get to the hospital and some other things. But about a half hour later, I called Wieringa back and he said, he’ll never forget the call. He gets a call back from me because they have no idea what's going on. I said, “You're going to need to send me a new truck.” And he told me recently in a conversation we had, how that was probably one of the funniest things he'd ever heard in the telephone calls, “Okay, send me a new truck because my truck was destroyed in that attack.”

But anyway, I wouldn't say it was a moment of horror, but it was a moment because I thought where you were going was a balancing off sort of adrenaline with humor because that was sort of what happened.

Well, no, interestingly I was, I actually, I stayed active in the Army Reserve all the way through. I commanded a brigade, basic combat training brigade, and it was located in the southeastern United States in Puerto Rico for several years. And so, I stayed active and then I … believe it or not, I think because of my sort of strange background or experience as an infantry officer, special forces officer, partner in a law firm, judge advocate experience, I went back into the infantry branch when I left active duty to go into private practice.

But somebody who knew me had mentioned to somebody who was looking for a replacement for the officer who was currently doing the security assistance work in Iraq, had floated my name that got to Jim Dubik. And Jim Dubik at that point was commanding mid sticky, which was the multinational security transition force in Iraq. And Jim, I think spoke with General Petraeus, who was commanding all the forces there at the time, and said, “Hey, we need to do something different in terms of our acquisition paradigm.” And I've heard the name of this guy, and he is a lawyer and a Green Beret in blah, blah, blah in the Army Reserve. And so, Jim Dubik literally called me he was getting on a helicopter someplace in Iraq, and I was sitting in my law firm, as a partner of the law firm in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. And I was preparing for a capital murder case. And so, I was sort of head down and focusing on that. And I get this call from Jim Dubik, and we're talking for a few minutes, and he basically tells me part of what I just told, and he said, “I'm really looking for somebody to bring in a fresh set of eyes to sort of foreign military sales and all this other jazz.”

I didn't even know what foreign military sales were. I said, “I don't know anything about acquisition. I don't know anything about foreign military sales. So, if you're looking for somebody who can bring in fresh that eyes, I'm your huckleberry.” And so, that ended up starting the conversation between a whole bunch of different folks. And so, I was ultimately asked to do the mission and learned a lot more about acquisition before I deployed than I knew, which was, a lot of stuff, I had to study. And then I got involved in a conversation, well, unbeknownst to me, between the services about who was the right person and what was the right background.

So, I ended up interviewing all; with Admiral Mullen for whom I have an incredible amount of respect and reverence for the job. And he was very gracious in that 30-minute conversation. He'll probably … I'll be probably guarded by how I characterize this, but I think he spoke longer than I did. But at the end, I left the office, and I had no clue whether I was going to Iraq or not. I'd already told all of my partners and my clients and everybody else back in North Carolina, “Hey, I'm leaving, sort of thing.” I think we'd already had a party. Julie's sitting out in the car at the River Terrace, and I go out to the car. She's like, “So, what do they say?” I said, “Well, I guess somebody's going to get back to us I don’t know.”

So, we ended up going to Iraq and things ended up working out well in terms of the capabilities of the organization and what the working organization did. So, that's when I came back to be on the joint staff.

But that was an unexpected inflection point in my sort of life path as it pertained to my professional life. And one that obviously changed some things as far as sort of how things went after my conversation with Admiral Mullen, but here we are.

So, if you think about it, I jumped into an organization that was a really interesting joint amalgamation of different capabilities. So, I mean, the Army was there, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the Air Force all inside my little organization, we had about 55 folks. We had civilians, DA civilians, department of the Army civilians as well.

And most of them were acquisition professionals. Not all of them. Most of them knew more about the whole system than I did. I very quickly sort of reverted back to my old ODA sort of view of things, which is figure out who's on the team, who's good at this, who's good at that.

And then you get individual replacements. Some services would send a soldier, sailor, airman Marine for six months, and others would send them for nine months, and some would send them for a year. So, the organization was constantly in flux. And so, it may sound kind of weird, but as a brigadier, I sort of reverted back to the way I look at things as a special forces officer in terms of, okay, who's on the team today? I'm the quarterback of this team, that doesn't make me the smartest person. It doesn't make me the most effective. It just means I'm responsible for orchestrating and integrating the capabilities of this organization. And those capabilities will continue to evolve and change depending on who's here and who has to leave and go back to the states and who's on emergency leave and who's gone to … So, all of that stuff was, I want to say intuitive, but kind of close to it for me.

I think the thing that was the most fulfilling for me in that role was, all the people that were working with me were really professionals in what they did. And those that didn't come there armed with a bunch of knowledge or understanding of the acquisition or architecture developed it, we found places for them to basically optimize what they were really good at, which in many cases was absolutely integral and critical to the organization.But through all of that, what I realized was my responsibility was really up and out. In other words, I was not the professional when it came to acquisition. I made it my role to be the face of that organization to the government of Iraq and to echelon inside the U.S. military. So, I spent most of my time dealing with senior Iraqi leaders about capabilities, whether it was for the Ministry of the Interior, the Counter-Terrorism Bureau or the Ministry of Defense. And so, I was sort of the outside sales guy frankly for the US, when it came to military capabilities for the Iraqis. And I think that was a role that I was relatively well suited for because I had this tremendous backing of all of these young professionals who knew their job, their role, their capabilities, and the systems to actually provide capability far better than I ever did or do. And so, I think that was not as tough a transition as you might think, because as the outside sales guy, I spent a lot of time moving. I mean all over Iraq, because I was dealing with the Iraqi Navy, so I spent a lot of time down from … working with those guys, spent a lot of time working with the counter terrorism bureau.

But you know, I was not in firefights, and if I was in a firefight, I was in the wrong place, shouldn't have been there because that wasn't what I was supposed to be doing. But it was very still operational in terms of, sort of how things went. I mean, I'll give you one example if I may. We had to get about $750 million out of Iraq into the federal bank in New York by the end of the year to maintain the ability of the minister of defense, minister of the interior to be able to access money that was allocated for them by the Iraqi government for programs that had not yet been funded. And so, three quarters of a billion dollars, a fair amount of money. And long story short, I had to go to the Central Bank of Iraq to basically take a piece of paper that ordered the Central Bank of Iraq to move the money from Baghdad to New York. Getting close to the end of the year and the Central Bank of Iraq was not in the green zone. And we had to take a very, very, very small convoy, myself and four other people with one other vehicle that had some British security in it to go make this transfer. So, it's just us.

And so, we get down to the bank, and the bank doesn't look like any bank you've ever seen in the United States. It looked like the back of a warehouse someplace, and the docs of you pick a port in the United States. And so, we're there, and I show up and I've got my translator, my interpreter and a couple security guys, and that's it. And a piece of paper signed off on by a whole bunch of leaders inside the government of Iraq authorizing this transfer. And I stopped at the door and explained to the guy at the Iraqi guards, who we are and what we need to do. And they're like “Okay, but only you can go in.” I'm like, “Well, that's not going to work because I don't speak Arabic, so my interpreter needs to come with me.”

“Okay, just the two of you, and you need to leave your weapon with us.” And I'm like, “Well, that's not going to happen. I mean, I'm a general officer in army, I relinquish my side on to no one. I have to keep my weapon with me.” And they're like, “Okay, fair enough.” And at this point, I've been in Iraq for long enough to sort of understand how you have to negotiate your way its something we can all live with.

And then it's occurred to me there’s security guys here and their job is to keep me from getting whacked. And so, I told the guy, the guard, I said, “Keith, there's three security people here, but one of them needs to be able to come with me.” I said, “And it's not because I don't feel safe, it's because if something bad happens to me, and none of them are even with me, they're going to be in big trouble. So, you need to let one of them come with me, and the other two will stay out here and they'll watch the vehicles whatever.” And the guard was, “Okay, okay.” So, we worked out a deal and the three of us went in, the security guard, the tarp and myself. And long story shorter, we go and take this piece of paper up to this guy and then the second floor of this building and some back room with stacks of paper everywhere. And I hand him this document and I feel like I've just … it's like bringing the broomstick back to the Wizard of Oz.

Finally, I brought this paper that we'd worked for a month to get all these signatures on authorizing this transfer, give it to the guy and the guy is like, “Okay.” Said, “Tomorrow's a bank holiday. But it'll be in the bank on Monday.” I'm thinking, “Bank holiday; there's no bank holiday. It was Sunday, the next day it was going to be Sunday.” And I'm thinking, “Shouldn't I get like a receipt for this? Or something, a stamp, something saying delivered?” And he said, “No, no, we're fine.” And so, this just three quarters of a billion dollars. So, I leave him the piece of paper there, and I go out. And I'm thinking, I had nothing to negotiate with. I mean, I'm not going to leave your building until you give me a piece of paper.

And I go back, and I brief my senior leadership, here's what the deal is, and they’re like, “You got to be kidding me.” I said, “No, we'll see.” And all I can say is Monday about 1300 Eastern time. So, whatever that was, 1900 back that time, three quarters of a billion dollars hits a federal reserve bank in New York. And my takeaway from that was, we Americans think that we've got this stuff sus but when these guys want to move money, they can move money.

I wasn't kinetic, but I wasn't in the green zone, and I was kind of by myself and I was not giving up my geo pistol. So, there we go.

So, I guess I'd say fundamentally, my leadership philosophy has evolved into a very simple concept, which is, lead with love. Authentic leadership is about, among other things, humility. And humility is not the same thing as modesty, but humility is really as somebody once wisely said, humility is not about thinking less of yourself, it's about thinking about yourself less. And I think authentic leadership is leadership that focuses on the mission and the team, and is able to empower the team, as we talked about earlier today. Empower the team in many ways by simply acknowledging to the team that the leader believes that the team and the mission are more important than the leader. And that quality, and we call it servant leadership or selfless service, but to me … my phrase and some other folks use it as well, leading with love sort of encapsulates that whole thing, because it's about enthusiasm, it's about stamina. It's about staying steady, it's about maintaining a sense of humor, it's about remaining curious, it's about focusing on things other than yourself and exuding that to others. Which is why I go back to cutting the antenna. By empowering others to be the best that they can be. Which you're also doing, even though you're not doing to manipulate anybody, but you're getting buy-in, because people realize that your job in your own heart is to help them be better than they were yesterday and to do it for something other than yourself.

So, if we think about it, from a military perspective, from a soldier, sailor, airman, marine, guardian, coasties perspective it's about the oath. We take an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies formed domestic and bear two faith and allegiance to the same. So, that's fundamentally about us. We're acknowledging from the get-go that there are things more important than us, and we're not taking an oath to a person or to a political party, or to an ideology or to a particular piece of ground. We're taking an oath to an idea.

And that idea is fundamental to getting us to where … so we have a thing called the Soldier's Creed. And the Soldier's Creed, it is a wonderful reflection of the ethos of the United States Army, in my opinion. And it starts off with, “I'm an American soldier. I'm a warrior member of a team. I serve the people of the United States. I live in the Army Values.” And it goes through a bunch of things in terms of discipline and expertise and focus and priorities. But we end it out with, “I'm a guardian of freedom and the American way of life.”

So, when I talk to soldiers, or sailors, or airmen, or marines, or guardians, or coasties about the American way of life, my view of that is pretty simple. That is not for me to decide what the American way of life is. Everybody's sort of … they can think about it however they want to think about it, but I encourage people to think about it in terms of at least two key fundamental things. One is opportunity, and the other is the supremacy of the rule of law. Because the supremacy of the rule of law is what underpins everything else in terms of giving as best we can, everybody access to opportunity and making sure that people are being treated fairly. And that both justice and liberty are important concepts in a self-governing representative democracy that has a constitutional framework. So, that oath in my view, is really a fundamental underpinning to authentic, effective leadership. And I think it always has been, and I think it always will be.

Ken Harbaugh:

That was Commander Jon Macaskill.

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